


Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett, retired Navy SEAL, vs. Mr. Pig, current pet guinea pig

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: (except set up a little strangely and it's 12+1 Things), 5+1 Things, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Food, Gen, Getting Together, Guinea Pig Fluff, M/M, Season/Series 01, Steve McGarrett Deserves Nice Things, all the fluff basically, guinea pigs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-10 02:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20520530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny reaches over and tugs a few strands of hay from the Velcro closing on one of Steve’s pockets.“Oh,” Steve says, weakly. He definitely doesn’t have flashbacks to falling flat on his ass that morning in the outdoor guinea run when he was trying to take a step and Mr. Pig zigged when he expected her to zag and he flailed dramatically while trying to avoid planting his foot on her. “Dunno where that came from. Very strange.”Ding ding ding, it’s the fight of the century! Place your bets now.





	Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett, retired Navy SEAL, vs. Mr. Pig, current pet guinea pig

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, I really don’t know if this is up to par, but I did a simple thing the day before yesterday that was really huge and scary to me (but really, really needed to be done), so this one is nothing but a ridiculous amount of utterly self-indulgent, silly fluff that I spent the rest of the day on (and then most of the two after, when it just kept getting longer), because I needed the distraction. It contains guinea pigs because I love guinea pigs. Comfort fic is straightforward like that, sometimes. 
> 
> ALSO. It’s my fiftieth fic in this fandom, so, hey, there’s a lot to celebrate. 🎉🌺

**The prequel**

“No,” Danny says sternly on Friday afternoon, “you can’t have a guinea pig. You already have Mr. Hoppy at your mom’s, remember?”

Grace doesn’t pout often, but when she does, it takes on epic proportions. Steve pouts right along with her through the rearview mirror, because he’s helpless against an onslaught like that, until Danny makes his voice even sterner and tells them both to quit it, because they’re already on their way to get shave ice and what more could they possibly want? He’ll turn this car around, if need be, just watch it, you two.

Steve is the one driving, but he doesn’t doubt Danny would find a way to do it, regardless.

*

**Round one**

Steve has no experience with pets. He never had any before his mom died; he obviously didn’t have any at boarding school or Annapolis or during active duty; he hasn’t even thought about getting any in the few months that he’s been back to semi-civilian life. When he thought this through, he may have done so somewhat incompletely.

“Only the one?” the woman who helps him in the pet shop asks. “Guinea pigs are very social animals, you know. In some countries it’s illegal to keep them on their own.”

Steve looks down into the box, where the single half-grown guinea pig he chose is huddled in a corner, curled up into a little ruddy brown ball. He feels very, very guilty about not doing his due diligence in research beforehand. This is not worthy of the way he usually executes an op.

Luckily he has expert informants to fall back on, like this PetSmart woman who definitely would never have an ulterior motive to sell him more than he intended to buy when he set foot in her store. It’s not like she already majorly upsold him on the cage.

“Alright,” he says, peering into the large, raised enclosure again. All five remaining guinea pigs for sale seem to be trying to squeeze into the same small rodent house at the same time. The golden, black and white ass of one hangs out the most, and the piggie attached to the ass wriggles and kicks until it’s free and has an opportunity to break from the rest and make a run for the next house, which is totally empty and open. “I’d like that one, too,” Steve says, charmed by this display of initiative and strategic thinking, which is his first mistake.

*

**Round two**

The solid ruddy brown one gets dubbed Mrs. Guinea and the patched tri-colored little rascal becomes Mr. Pig. They’re both girls – even with his limited knowledge, Steve understands enough about basic biology to have an inkling that might be a good idea if he doesn’t want to end up dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. He’s lived his life carefully avoiding anything of the sort.

He sets up their giant indoor cage in his living room, next to the windows in the back, where they’ll have plenty of light and be able to see the entire space. He pads it with newspaper and unbleached shaved paper bedding and a few fluffy mountains of the highest quality commercially available hay he could find. He is also the brand new owner of some fence panels that can be set up and moved around in the garden, so the pigs will be able to enjoy life outside when the weather allows it, and he has three different kinds of shelter to set up in their cage and a little hammock and a water bottle and a shallow ceramic food bowl that has _DINNER TIME_ printed in big block letters on the side, next to a picture of a carrot. After he spends the afternoon obsessively googling, he makes another run to the store to purchase a set of wooden chew sticks, because apparently their teeth will keep growing, and aside from a healthy diet, they might need additional things to gnaw on to keep those incisors short. 

The PetSmart woman is delighted to see him again so soon; Mrs. Guinea sniffles at the chew sticks, but eventually leaves them alone, and Mr. Pig doesn’t even look at them before she sets her teeth in the door jamb of one of the three tiny houses instead.

“It’s not gingerbread,” Steve tells her, and tries to offer her the chew stick, but she just huddles inside the house until he withdraws his hand and she can go back to loudly scraping her teeth along the wall in peace.

*

**Round three**

The guinea pigs are kind of shy, at first. It makes sense: if Steve had just been carried off in a box and put in a cage by some giant, however careful, he’d be sticking to defensible locations, too. He figures they’ll need some socialization, so he takes them out of their cage and handfeeds them each some fresh parsley while they sit in his lap. It disappears into their tiny bodies at speeds that dizzy him, and he’s spent much of his life eating in mess halls around marines at least a hundred times their size. Evidently, appetite is not something that nature divvies up proportionally to physical form.

Mrs. Guinea, after she’s done with the food, sits frozen, eyes so wide they bulge out a little. When he shifts on his chair, she tries to burrow under the seam of his T-shirt to hide away, which tickles.

Mr. Pig does the same vanishing trick with the parsley, but doesn’t go in for the hiding. She nips Steve’s finger – she doesn’t bite, but he briefly feels her teeth – and then pees in his lap.

*

**Round four**

The next time he tries to build trust, he decides to let them roam free on the living room floor for a little. Maybe that way, he’s not pushing his presence on them as much, and they can explore the space they’ll be spending most of their lives in while also getting used to having him move around in it. The old floorboards can take a little pee if necessary, and he comes prepared with towels this time.

It goes well, for a value of that which means both piggies evacuate the open space where he puts them post haste and then huddle under his dad’s old desk, which is as close as they can get to their cage – which they seem to like, at least – while still enjoying a measure of shelter. Steve whips out a book on military animals he’d been reading even before Grace tried pouting at Danny and settles in the lazy chair, from where he has a good line of sight on the desk and what’s under it. He’ll give them ten to fifteen minutes, he figures, and then put them back in the cage.

When he glances over after reading two paragraphs, Mr. Pig is on the move. He catches sight of her just in time to bellow “_no_!” before she fully sticks her nose into the open power outlet on the wall just above the baseboard, but his voice and the way he jumps up and flings his book in the opposite direction across the room are all so jarring that it makes both guinea pigs beat a panicky retreat. Their nails skitter across the floorboards and Mrs. Guinea follows Mr. Pig’s tri-colored ass into the first hidey hole that Mr. Pig discovers: the couple inches of space under the cabinet that’s pushed against the wall near the desk.

Steve has to get a flashlight from his emergency survival kit and lie flat on the floor to see them. He doesn’t dare move the heavy wooden dresser with them under it, so in the end it takes forty-five minutes, nearly getting his arm stuck under there twice, a lot of crawling around on hands and knees and negotiations that end in a huge concession of parsley from his side, before he manages to draw them back out again far enough to be caught.

*

**Round five**

When Steve enters the office on Monday, Danny asks, “Why is there grass stuck to your pants?”

“What? There is no-”

Danny reaches over and tugs a few strands of hay from the Velcro closing on one of Steve’s pockets.

“Oh,” Steve says, weakly. He definitely doesn’t have flashbacks to falling flat on his ass that morning in the outdoor guinea run when he was trying to take a step and Mr. Pig zigged when he expected her to zag and he flailed dramatically while trying to avoid planting his foot on her. “Dunno where that came from. Very strange.”

Danny stares at him long and slow and dubiously. “Sure, Pinocchio.”

Steve pretends not to get that reference, even when Chin and Kono join them and it gets embarrassing. It’s perhaps not his finest moment.

*

**Round six**

Never let it be said that Steve McGarrett refuses to learn from his mistakes. After the living room incident, he only lets the guinea pigs roam the kitchen floor indoors, where there are no wires to gnaw through, no outlets close to the floor, not much furniture to hide under and, as a particular bonus for him, a tile floor that’s much easier to clean. He keeps the doors shut and it really works, for the most part, even if it means he ends up shuffling everywhere while preparing dinner. 

It’s kind of fun, having the companionship. He pushes a slice of cucumber from the counter every once in a while and gets to watch his two girls reenact the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp with it until one of them digs her teeth in, tugs it free from the other and tries to make a run for it. Neither of them ever gets very far before the other catches up. 

One evening, while he’s doing meal prep for the rest of the week, he’s confronted again with the fact that even though he’s read through a lot of forum posts and consulted various other internet resources by now, his guinea pig knowledge is still woefully full of holes. He’s dividing fruit over freezer bags that will each end up containing one ready to blend breakfast smoothie, when he ends up with a leftover chunk of banana. Usually he’d sneak it into one of the bags at random or pop it into his own mouth, but the discovery perfectly coincides with when Mr. Pig puts her two tiny front feet on his bare foot, curious about what’s happening way up above her.

He looks down at her little face and pink ears, and holds the banana where she can see it. “Can you eat this, boo?” 

Mr. Pig doesn’t answer, but tries to climb as high up Steve’s leg as she can. Because guinea pigs are not hamsters and carry a little too much bulk for true acrobatics, she doesn’t get any further than standing on her hind legs, body stretched out, nose in the air.

“Okay,” Steve admits, “stupid question. I know you _can_, but _should_ you?”

He decides not to let Mr. Pig have the banana. Mr. Pig lets out a series of high-pitched squeaks in revenge while she watches him chew, like she knows exactly what just happened, which sets off Mrs. Guinea. They don’t calm down until he reopens one of the bags he’d already sealed and sneaks them each some kale, which he’s at least 99% sure they’re allowed to have.

He still worries about that 1%, so he keeps an extra eye on them all night. 

*

**Round seven**

“Sir,” the librarian says, looking a little taken aback when Steve slams a stack of books on small rodent care down in front of her that’s high enough they have to look past it, because he can’t see her over top. “You can’t take out more than six books at a time on one card.”

He fishes his badge from the top of the stack. On second thought, that wasn’t the most visible place to put it. “It’s important,” he adds, gravely, vaguely aware in the back of his mind that owning guinea pigs has now turned him into a corrupt cop.

(His new life of crime does, however, lead him to the discovery that banana is safe to eat for guinea pigs, as long as it’s fresh, ripe and offered as a special treat in very small quantities in order to prevent diabetes, digestive problems, obesity and other issues that an overload on sugar could cause. For the first time ever, he truly understands that sometimes crime pays.)

*

**Round eight**

In the middle of the afternoon, Danny calls to ask if he and Grace can lay claim to some of Steve’s day because Grace wants to go swimming. Steve says yes so quickly he doesn’t have a chance to consider what letting them into his house would mean until Danny has already promised to be there in twenty and hung up on him, but his mind starts spinning a little at that point. He goes to stand by the guinea pig cage, where he stares at the two of them going about their happy little rodent business, nibbling on bell pepper and yawning and doing a poo, and wonders if it’s too late to take them back to the shop where he bought them.

Obviously, the answer is yes, followed by _and that’s ridiculous, you idiot_.

He ends up carefully storing away every single book on the subject of guinea pigs that’s scattered anywhere around the house, even the one on the nightstand in his bedroom. Then he reconsiders, because if he can’t hide the huge guinea pig cage, there’s no real point to hiding the books, so he picks a select few to strategically place on the arm of the couch and the low table next to the stairs. He hopes it radiates responsible guinea pig ownership, or at least indicates he knows he shouldn’t let them play with grenades.

Danny never rings the doorbell, but Steve still startles when the front door swings open with no warning. It’s made a little better when Grace comes in first, carrying a purple backpack that probably has her swimming clothes in it. “Hi Uncle Steve!” she chirps, and he grins at her and is about to open his arms for a hug, when Grace catches sight of the cage, gasps, and storms over to have a look, straight past Steve.

“Steven,” a voice on his other side says. It’s Danny, obviously, who looks deeply unimpressed. “What the hell is that?”

“A cage,” Steve admits. He intends to leave it at that, but then gets scared Danny could think it’s something freaky or dangerous and want to take Grace and leave, so he adds, totally not guiltily at all, “Containing two guinea pigs.”

Danny levels him with another one of those long, penetrating looks. “Ah, I see. And this wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain girl expressing a desire for ownership of a guinea pig, would it?”

“No,” Steve says, wide-eyed. “What girl?”

*

**Round nine**

Grace is _thrilled_. She is _wild_ with enthusiasm for both Mrs. Guinea and Mr. Pig, and she tells Steve she really likes the names he chose, which makes Steve have to hide a glow of satisfaction, and she immediately asks if she can pet them and feed them and pick them up. “Danno, look!” she yells, but in a whisper, because of course Danny has raised her to be considerate to animals. “It scratched its own ear!”

They’re all standing in a semi-circle around the cage now, and Danny slides a sideways look at Steve over Grace’s head. “Yeah, Monkey. That’s quite a trick, huh?”

Steve does his best to find a good medium between completely innocent and guilty in an apologetic way, but it’s hard to keep worrying about Danny’s half-hearted disapproval when he’s really just elated that Grace is enjoying this so much. He clears his throat. “Hey Gracie, you want to hold one of them?”

Grace almost starts vibrating in anticipation when she says yes, so Steve fetches towels from the kitchen – a stack of them, just to be sure – and gets Grace situated on the couch with a good amount of padding in her lap. He hands her a bowl with some chopped carrots and a little parsley, and then scoops Mrs. Guinea out of the cage and introduces her to Grace properly. “She’s so cute,” Grace says, almost reverently, while she watches Mrs. Guinea tug and munch on the carrot she’s holding and strokes a careful, light hand over the guinea pig’s fur.

Steve, watching Grace interact with Mrs. Guinea, realizes that he really, really loves this kid, in a way that scares him a little with how much he needs her to be okay and happy.

“So what about me?” Danny asks. “Don’t I get one?”

That’s how Danny ends up on the other end of the couch, Mr. Pig in his lap on even more towels than Steve handed Grace. Steve takes a seat on the coffee table and just lets it all wash over him for a moment.

Danny, who’s a good Detective and an even better friend, catches him at it. Steve thinks he’s going to get called out on his extremely transparent scheme now, but instead Danny gestures at Mr. Pig’s golden and white back and asks, “So what possessed you to call this one a Mr. if you know it’s a she?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know.” Yes, he does. He wanted a Mr. Hoppy analogy, because that seemed like it might have the best chance at enamoring Grace. “Why not? She’s a good match for Mrs. Guinea.”

Danny grins. “That’s very heteronormative of you, babe.”

“Well, something in this house had to be straight,” Steve says, and he doesn’t even get why Danny gives him that stricken look until a solid minute later, because at the time he’s way too busy struggling with inappropriate feelings of jealousy over how comfortable Mr. Pig looks in Danny’s lap. 

Oh, the irony.

*

**Round ten**

Owning guinea pigs makes a marked difference in Steve’s vegetable consumption, because often it’s easy to set a little aside for himself when he’s washing and chopping greens anyway. This leads, eventually, to Danny looking a little disturbed while they’re having lunch together in Danny’s office. Steve takes notice, but waits him out.

It doesn’t take long for Danny to start waving a ketchup-dipped take-out fry around. “Okay, so what’s this? You’ve always been a green sludge smoothie kind of guy, but since when do you bring your own packed lunches to work? More to the point, why is it a _green salad_? That’s not your usual protein-packed nightmare fare.”

Steve pauses mid-chomp on a mouthful of lettuce. “Guinea pigs.”

Danny looks conflicted. “As long as this is not a misguided attempt at dieting.” 

That hadn’t even occurred to Steve. He pauses again, but swallows before answering this time. “It’s not.”

“Good. Much as your brain needs some serious maintenance, you really don’t have a single thing to improve on body-wise.”

Steve had expected Danny to be full of praise over his sudden nature-based eating habits, but he’s unexpectedly touched by the way this actually went down. That, and a little hopeful about the implications of the compliment attached to it.

He selflessly steals a handful of Danny’s fries to reassure Danny, and Danny lets him get away with it. 

After that, he goes back to eating the same take-out meals that power the rest of the team. More often than not, the guinea pig’s diet has the opposite effect on him anyway: he has a fridge full of greens (and reds and oranges and a little yellow), but none of it is for him, leaving him scrounging in the pantry for canned peas for dinner.

*

**Round eleven**

One morning, while he’s enjoying his post-run coffee, he finds Mr. Pig chasing Mrs. Guinea around the outdoor run, making odd, sinuous movements and low rumbling noises, until Mr. Pig manages to corner Mrs. Guinea and mounts her.

Steve nearly spits out his coffee. “Oh, God,” he says, which does not put a stop to Mr. Pig’s humping. He’d be worried, too, because if he got Mr. Pig’s biological sex wrong all this time he’d either have to give one of the pigs up or keep them in separate cages, which would be a hassle, and he really doesn’t feel mentally stable enough to be a guinea pig granddad, either. His saving grace is that by now he’s read (stolen and devoured, a Danny-sounding voice in his head says) enough piggie books from the library to recognize this as normal behavior between two females, meant to establish dominance.

Still, it… doesn’t really look like that. Kind of looks like they’re having fun.

“Do you have to outdo me at everything?” he asks, out loud, so Mr. Pig will know her human is disgruntled now. He leaves to finish his coffee somewhere else, because he’s starting to feel like a voyeur.

*

**Round twelve**

When it finally happens, they slip into it a lot more easily than Steve ever expected. He and Danny bump into each other when they both try to reach for the two stacked plates while clearing the table, and Danny gives up on the plates and instead turns to Steve where they stand and says, smiling, “Hey, thanks for dinner. Didn’t even know you could cook anything other than oatmeal.”

“Yeah.” Steve leans against the table, entranced. He tries very hard not to look at Danny’s lips. “I guess you could say I have hidden depths.” That, and internet access and an aptitude for following instructions to the letter.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve echoes, and they might have gone on like that for a while, but that’s when Danny makes use of Steve’s slouched stance to kiss him right on the mouth.

Steve slouches further, over the next few minutes. Their height difference is going to end up hurting his neck, but he doesn’t have the power of will to care.

It’s when Danny turns his head and Steve sets to work kissing his jaw that things start to go wrong. “Steve?” Danny asks, sounding distracted.

“Yeah?”

“Are your guinea pigs having sex?”

He withdraws from Danny’s face a little and suppresses a sigh. Now that he’s paying attention again, he can hear telltale noises. “Possibly. They do that sometimes.” Steve would like to be able to make that claim, too. He pops the top button of Danny’s shirt, in hopes of getting at that tie next, but Danny doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Babe,” he says, extricating himself from Steve’s grip to walk over to the cage in apparent fascination. “Your female guinea pigs are humping each other and they’re the straightest thing in your house?”

Steve follows Danny helplessly and rests his hands on Danny’s hips, peering at the cage over his shoulder. “It’s kind of hopeless,” he agrees.

Danny bends over, which pushes his ass back against Steve very close to where he’d like it. He doesn’t mind that at all, until he realizes Mr. Pig and Mrs. Guinea have separated and Danny is now making little cooing noises and has stuck an arm through the opening in the roof of the cage, in an attempt to get the pigs to offer themselves up for petting. 

Steve is still trying to find a way to say _please pay more attention to me_ that doesn’t use any of those words in that order, when Danny suddenly says, alarmed, “Hey, stop that! Son of a bitch, let go.”

Steve lifts his hands and jumps back before Danny is even finished speaking. Danny straightens up and turns to him, holding the dangling tip of his tie in two fingers. “Not you, idiot. Your guinea pig has no regard for true finery. It tried to eat my tie. Look-” Danny flaps the end of the tie. “Teeth marks.”

Steve is lost for words. He’d ask which one of them did it, but by now, he knows. Mr. Pig has now officially managed to set his teeth in Danny before Steve has, been able to launch an attack on Danny’s tie before Steve has, and had more sex today than it seems Steve will be having. “That would be a daughter of a sow, actually,” he says, eventually, because being pedantic about _son of a bitch_ is something which Mr. Pig, who to the best of Steve’s knowledge doesn’t know any words at all, at least won’t be able to take from him.

“That’s very enlightening,” Danny says. “Thank you, Merriam-Webster.” 

Then he starts pulling on the knot of his tie until he can slip the loop over his head, leaving his shirt collar standing up and the one button Steve managed to pop gaping open to reveal some skin he usually doesn’t get to see, and oh, hey, Steve thinks. Maybe not all is lost yet.

*

**Rematch**

“Can we come visit your roommates?” Danny asks on the phone, and of course Steve says yes, so twenty minutes later Grace bursts through his front door, followed by Danny, who takes up just as much space but operates a little less like a small hurricane. 

Grace drops her backpack at the foot of the stairs, which is a habit she’s managed to form because she’s been here so many times by now. She hurries right past Steve in the direction of the guinea pigs, holding a carrot she apparently brought over from Danny’s place, before she suddenly yells “oh!” and executes a U-turn.

“What?” Steve asks, worried. Almost before he can finish, Grace has flung her arms around his waist and is hugging him tightly, so he hugs her back, startled.

“Almost forgot,” she says. “Hi Uncle Steve, love you.” 

He swallows hard. “I love you too, Gracie.” 

“I know,” Grace says, and then she steps back and heads for the cage in the back of the room for real. Steve watches her go.

So does Danny, but he’s also watching Steve’s face when he says, “You know we don’t come here for the guinea pigs, right? They’re just a really weird unnecessary bonus you decided to sneak into our visits to you.”

“Yes, I know that,” Steve says, but his voice sounds a little more like a guinea pig than it should. He blinks hard, a few times, before he abruptly turns to the piggie cage and points at its inhabitants, and Mr. Pig in particular. “Hah! You hear that?”

“Oh my God,” Danny says, aghast, “why am I not surprised you’re locked in a secret competition with a small rodent? What has my life become?”

Before Steve can even try to scrape together an answer to that, Grace provides one. “Something really fun, Danno,” she says, happily. She’s dangling her arm through the opening in the roof of the cage, but she only barely manages to stick the carrot in far enough that Mr. Pig and Mrs. Guinea can get at it. The guinea pigs are not deterred by this increased level of difficulty, following the carrot around when needed. If it comes to food, they’re up for a challenge.

Steve looks over at Danny, who is smiling at Grace, and Steve’s heart maybe skips a beat. “That’s all I wanted,” he says, achingly honest.

Danny’s eyes go from Grace to him and he has that look in them, that soft _oh, I love you with my whole damn heart_ look, and it doesn’t fade away or dull when he looks at Steve, and that simple fact kind of takes Steve’s breath away, a little. He feels light-headed.

Until, of course, his guinea pigs start screaming because they’ve eaten too much of the carrot and can’t get at the rest, so he has to open up the door at the front of the cage to give Grace better access and prevent an actual riot. Such is the life of a man who tries to use pets to lure people closer, and then accidentally gets attached to all of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! I hope you have or had or will soon have a good day. ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
